Don’t worry. Everyone knows that under capitalism anyone can open a shop to compete with lower prices for a slice of that pie.

This is clearly a global conspiracy orchestrated by GabeN to make the Steam Machine look better!

Very much so. I bet most of those people have never run an open source project or business, but they all have an opinion.

Pretty sad to hear this though since I really like Tailwind. I wonder how many other projects this vibe coding bullshit will harm. So sad to see more wealth being concentrated instead of being distributed.

.clone() everything!

I do kind of agree in a way though. Rust forces you to think a bit about memory and the language does tend to guide towards good design. But it’s not magic and it’s easy to write inefficient Rust too. Especially if you just clone everything. But I personally find Rust to be a good mix of low level control that feels sufficiently high level.

Garbage collected languages can be memory efficient too though. Having easily shared references is great!

That makes sense to me! Good behaviour should be rewarded.

Maybe something has changed, but I don’t think I can buy Amazon mp3s in Canada?

That’s a tough one for me anyway. On one hand, owning music is something I value, but on the other hand Amazon is a company I cannot support in good conscience. I feel like the person in the two button meme!

And yet, in my own sort of hypocrisy, I currently use a Google Nexus phone flashed with Graphene. But… I still gave money to Google. Ethics are difficult. Something about no ethical consumption. 🙂

I think you’re asking why you can’t own music? It’s because the vast majority of it is streamed and it’s not trivial to keep it. Sure, if you know what Github is you can find all sorts of software to rip the streams, but that’s asking a lot from most people who have trouble installing an official client.

There is Bandcamp, which is reasonably priced and I think pays artists well? So some hope there. I haven’t really looked at the license agreement, so no idea if they can remove anything you’ve already purchased (keep backups of your downloads! 😀 )

There’s also vinyl records, but new pressings are quite expensive. I buy some old records, but the new stuff I reserve for albums I really like.

I like owning my music so that nobody can take away the stuff I paid for. I’ve moved streaming services before and there have been gaps in the library. Not to mention, most of the streaming clients are actually pretty terrible. If I just had a bunch of files, I could use whichever audio player I like and not be stuck with whatever crap the streaming provider lets me use.

There are exceptions to all of these things, with varying degrees of compromise, but the general trend is towards licensing everything and us having little to no ownership. And it’s entirely possible that places like Bandcamp won’t be able to sustain a business in the face of rising costs that the large streaming platforms can handle. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen.

This is why I stick with open source. Sadly, I don’t know what to do about hardware. For a GPU, go with AMD I guess?

The worst is that this isn’t even the lack of ownership I want! I’d love to not own a car and have reliable public transit, but can’t have that. Instead, I’m not allowed to own the computers and software I buy, or the music I like, or pretty much anything else that brings me joy. Heck, you don’t even own the posts you make in the large social media sites!

Doom Emacs on Arch with Plasma.

The AI crash can’t come soon enough…

Hence me saying games run fine off an SD card after a reference to a quote falsely attributed to Bill Gates 😁

256GB ought to be enough for anyone!

I run most of my games off an SD card and it’s been fine.

(It seems people have not heard of the Bill Gates 640KB quote and/or my delivery is off)

Touchpads on the Deck are really great for on screen menus for things like ability bars and whatnot.

I run Sunshine on Arch-KDE-Wayland with a 4070Ti and stream at 1440 to another PC running the same thing. I haven’t checked frame rates in a while but it seems to be running fine for me.

Does the Thor run Linux with the standard Moonlight client? If you haven’t looked yet, double check Moonlight’s settings and make sure the frame rate, resolution, and other settings look ok.

If you’re streaming a Steam game, also make sure Steam doesn’t have it’s recording enabled. I think Valve enabled it by default some time ago and that tanked my frame rate at the time. There’s a “Game Recording” section in Steam’s settings where you can turn it off.

Sunshine also has logs in the Troubleshooting section on its web client. Maybe see if there’s anything fishy in there too.

“Agentic Engineering”. No, it’s called vibe coding. AI bros are so desperate for legitimacy they make up fancy sounding titles for themselves.

But this isn’t engineering. Engineering takes rigor and discipline and process and understanding… A lot of it is extremely boring too. The code itself is probably the easiest (and I’d argue least important) part of software engineering. These guys are burning down forests to poorly automate the easy part.

I’m not saying that coding is easy in an absolute sense, but only relative to the rest of the discipline. A good engineer knows how to design/architect a system, understand tradeoffs, balance customer/user requirements with business needs, set up proper testing and releases, properly document everything, etc.

I can think of no higher praise for the DMA!

Ah yes, a fine example of small government free market.

LED? Luxury! 😁

I had one board with an improperly loaded power supply and I could tell what it was doing by the pattern and pitch of the squeal.

It did have a debug UART though, but I did come to find the sound pretty useful too!

I block it’s MAC at the router to prevent internet access but I still allow it on the LAN for ALVR. The ALVR client can be side loaded so no need to let the Quest online.

Hopefully it’s not spoofing a different MAC to be sneaky though. I’ll have to check my router logs.

I guess all these years of using apps from outside the Play Store and apps I’ve written myself have been an illusion.